European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the Bill we are debating tonight is short but certainly not sweet—at least for a person like myself who voted last June to remain in the European Union. In her Lancaster House speech, the Prime Minister exhorted us to believe that leaving the European Union leads towards a brighter future for our children and our grandchildren. I am sorry to disappoint the Prime Minister, but neither I, nor my children, nor my grandchildren believe that. It remains my view that we will be less prosperous, less secure and less influential in the world than we would have been had we decided to stay in the EU. But that was not the view taken by the majority of those who voted, and I accept, as I have since 24 June, that it would not be proper or correct for this House to frustrate the triggering of Article 50. I only wish that the ardent supporters of Brexit, some of them in this House, would cease denigrating and trying to suppress the views of those who think as I do. That surely is as undemocratic an approach as you can get.

While the Lancaster House speech and the White Paper which followed it have lifted a small part of the veil in which the Government have shrouded their policy since the referendum, we have not yet seen more than a glimpse of its ankle, and we have not been given a single metric or impact assessment on the choices the Government have already made and are preparing to make more of. Not a figure has emerged setting out the various options and costing them as those published last March, from which the new Government have resiled, are no longer valid. There has been no word about the shape of the new immigration regime, the altar on which our membership of the single market is to be sacrificed, and no hint of how the Government propose to sustain the common travel area with Ireland and to avoid the reimposition of border controls on goods moving between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The Government assure us that they have been conducting detailed studies of all these matters, and on every part of the economy, but they have not shown us the results of any of those studies—perhaps the results are just too alarming to be shown. We are really being asked to buy a pig in a poke.

What can one say about the choices the Government have made already? It was surely unwise to make a pre-emptive decision to leave the single market before we had any idea of what alternatives might be negotiable. Issues relating to freedom of movement are under great stress at the moment within the European Union. Might it not have been better to see how much flexibility could be available in 18 months’ time, rather than to decide now that we were not going to even look for that flexibility? As for the customs union, if our partners can understand what the Government said in the White Paper, they are better at reading runes than I am.

It is helpful that the Government have now begun to face up to the fact that we need a dispute settlement procedure as part of our new partnership—although they have not, I have to say, got very far. It is truly staggering that a Government who accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, of the International Criminal Court, of the European Court of Human Rights, of the dispute settlement procedures of the World Trade Organization and of the Law of the Sea should have conceived such a horror of the European Court of Justice, despite the fact that the court has often in the last 44 years handed down judgments of great benefit to this country, such as striking down restrictive practices and dealing with illegal state aid and non-tariff barriers to trade. Of course it has made judgments during that time which we did not like—but so, of course, does our own Supreme Court, as the Government have discovered quite recently.

Faced with this paucity of information and this degree of obfuscation, what can and should we do when we look at the Bill in detail? The most important thing is to ensure that, when a deal is struck, or when it is clear that one cannot be struck, both Houses are seized of the outcome in a timely manner, enabling them to make decisions and to avoid that cliff edge which the Prime Minister, quite rightly, wishes to avoid. Some assurances have been given to this effect in the other place, but they are fairly vague and are no doubt capable of any amount of subsequent misleading description and use. Provisions on this point clearly need to go into the Bill—and, since the Government have conceded the principle, it should not be too difficult to do that.

I have one concluding thought. The UK needs to concentrate on the positive aspects of its vision for a new partnership to establish that prospect of mutual benefit without which any hope of a positive outcome for negotiations will simply not materialise. The Government have begun to do this on foreign policy and European security, on scientific co-operation and on law enforcement and internal security—but so far in far too tentative and hesitant a way. We need to face outwards, towards our past and future partners, not backwards towards those who reject everything about the European Union. Our face needs to be a smiling and not a snarling one—particularly to the 3 million citizens from other European countries who live and work here.